All this, of course, does not apply to clergymen whose efforts are purely "ex parte," and where a reply on the part of the pew is considered an offense.
Wendell Phillips advised the young oratorical aspirant to take "a course of mobs." Most certainly Bradlaugh did, and then he continued to take post-graduate courses. His Donnybrook experiences were simply prophetic.
The crowds at Hyde Park who came to hear him speak were not actuated wholly by a desire to hear the answer to Pilate's question.
Bradlaugh had his own corner in the Park where he spoke on Sunday mornings, when the weather was pleasant. At this meeting he invited replies, so the proceeding usually took the form of a debate. And he had a way of enlivening in a similar manner the service of his friends the enemy. Often the audience, for pure love of mischief, would start pushing, and two hundred hoodlums would overrun the meeting. There was no special violence about it—it is very English, you know. Occasionally it happens yet in Hyde Park, and the true London Bobby, who never sees anything he does not want to see, allows the beefeaters to crowd, jostle, and push themselves tired. It was really all very funny unless you were caught in the pushing crowd, then all you could do was to keep on your feet and go with the merry mass. But the attendance at Hyde Park meetings was increasing, and in the rough- house, at times, some one would fall and be trampled upon.
So an order was issued from Scotland Yard that all public speaking in the parks should cease between ten o'clock in the morning and two in the afternoon. This was during church hours, for church attendance had begun to fall off very perceptibly.
Bradlaugh thought the order was without due process of law—that the parks belonged to the people, and that public speaking in the open was not an abuse of the people's rights. More people than ever flocked to Hyde Park on the Sunday set for the fray. Bradlaugh arranged that a dozen or more of his colleagues should begin to speak at the same time in different parts of the park. The police began to charge and the crowds began to push. Then the police used their truncheons. Two policemen seized Bradlaugh. He politely asked them to keep their hands off, and when they did not he showed them his quality by wresting their truncheons from them, and flinging them to the cheering crowd. He then bumped the heads of the officers together, inciting riot, so ran the records.
This all sounds rather tragic, and I am sorry to believe that Bradlaugh rather enjoyed it. No one man physically was a match for him, and all men fall easy victims to their facility. The police did not succeed on this occasion in arresting him; and it seems that there was a sentiment abroad that made the Government hesitate about arresting him on a bench warrant. A few years before, and Bradlaugh would have been hanged, and there would 'a been an end on't. However, several friends of the "Cause" were locked up, and the next day Bradlaugh appeared in court to defend them. A truce was declared, without renouncing the rights of free speech, and Bradlaugh agreed, for the present, to cease holding public meetings.
The little weekly newspaper, "The Reasoner," published by Bradlaugh was paying expenses, and there was a fair demand for his intellectual wares. When he lectured in the provinces, there were the usual warnings from pastors to their flocks which served to lessen the advertising expenses of the lecture. Many of those warned not to go, of course went, just to see how bad it was. Then occasionally halls were closed against Bradlaugh on account of local pressure, and lawsuits followed, for the "Iconoclast," while not believing much in law, was yet so inconsistent as to invoke it. So all through life, when he did not have a lawsuit on hand, existence seemed tasteless and insipid. After he had lectured in a town, there was the usual theological and oratorical pyrotechnics in reply, with sermons from that indelicate text, "The fool saith in his heart, there is no God," and challenges that he should come back and fight it out. The number of people who won tuppence worth of fame by replying to Ingersoll were as naught compared to those who achieved fame by berating Bradlaugh.
In all of the opposition encountered by Ingersoll, his arguments were never met with physical violence. Halls were locked against him, newspapers denounced him, preachers thundered, but no mobs gathered to hoot him down. Neither did he ever have to excuse himself in the midst of a discourse, and go outside to stop a tin-pan serenade.
The Governor of Delaware, I believe, once notified Ingersoll that Delaware had its whipping-post ready for his benefit when he came that way. But the threat raised such a laugh that Delaware, for a time, became a national joke. Later, a committee of Delaware citizens, as if to make amends, invited Colonel Ingersoll to speak at Dover, and this he did, also addressing the State Legislature.